“It’s money that holds that thief together,” Flavius said. There was nothing any of them could do about Domitian’s war except fight it as ordered, and a family council had gathered to attack the more pressing problem of doing something about Marius Vettius. “Aemelius’s money, pirate money, whatever he’s extorted one way or another – it all goes to keep Domitian smiling on him and to buy the army. No money, no Vettius. A pity we can’t separate him from it.”
“I do not understand this matter of buying an army,” Ygerna said.
Flavius chuckled. “That’s because you haven’t read enough Roman history, child.”
“That’s not true,” Correus said. “That is the black side, but it’s not always true.”
“Mithras forbid I should insult the army in my brother’s presence,” Flavius said piously, “but it is true. The army holds the empire together, and it makes the emperors as often as not, and soldiers who don’t get paid don’t stay loyal very long. Vettius is passing out some fat bonuses and spending a lot more on gladiators and the like to keep the troops amused. ‘This week’s entertainment sponsored by the unlimited generosity of Marius Vettius, friend of the soldier.’ If we could stop that, we might stop him.”
“I begin to see,” Ygerna said. She looked disgusted. “Is that why the horse race?”
“What horse race?”
“There was a notice put up in the market. The sort they announce the arena shows with. I always read them for the practice. This one was for a horse race, with chariots, at the end of the summer. Vettius is paying for it. Or no, I think it said Vettius will hold the bets. I don’t quite understand that.”
“I do, the thieving son of a bitch,” Correus said. “If Vettius holds the bets, he expects to win. If that race isn’t fixed, I’ll eat my saddle.”
“Well, it’s certainly his style,” Flavius said. “He gives the troops some fun and cheats them at the same time. Why Domitian can’t see through him is a mystery fourteen augurs couldn’t explain.”
“I don’t expect the emperor cares if Vettius cheats the soldiers,” Ygerna said practically. “He didn’t care if he cheated your father-in-law.”
Correus was looking thoughtful. “When is this race?”
“The notice said at the end of summer, when the army reaches the Moenus. For a reward. There will be gladiators too, in the emperor’s honor. That is horrid, but I would like to see the horse race.”
“I expect you can,” Correus said. “We’ll dig in at the Moenus for a while and put up a permanent fort.” Ygerna didn’t like being left in Lopodunum, but he couldn’t take her and the children out with the road-building crews. He was still thinking. If all went well, they would halt at the Moenus to build a bridge and meet with Velius Rufus, with most of the Agri Decumates under control. The emperor would be there, and all the hangers-on who trailed in the army’s wake would come with him. A big enough population to serve Vettius’s purpose. And maybe theirs. He looked up at Flavius. “D’you think we could liven up his horse race for him?”
Three hundred miles to the east, in Steinvarshold on the Semnones’ home ground, Lady Morgian’s husband sat looking at a visitor who had ridden in that morning. The remains of a feast were scattered on the table top, and a thrall was sweeping spilled food into her apron. Steinvar leaned back in his chair, one thin hand wrapped around a beer horn, and the other feeding pieces of meat from the table to a red hound bitch by his feet. His scarred face was creased into a smile. Steinvar liked the man who was sitting at the table with him. His name was Decebalus, and he was a prince of Dacia, the country that bordered the Roman province of Moesia along the Danuvius.
Decebalus was younger than Steinvar, with curling brown hair and beard, and a heavy mouth half-hidden under a mustache. He had a heavy straight nose and a square jaw, and brown, thick-lidded eyes. He looked like a man who was used to arranging the world to suit him. Decebalus wore a shirt and breeches much like Steinvar’s, and a felt cap with a rounded point pulled forward and pinned down over the forehead. He stretched and belched appreciatively. “That was good.”
“Not so good as your father’s house,” Steinvar said. “But you won’t starve among us. That is enough. Go on, go!” He shooed the thrall away.
The thrall shrugged and left. They had eaten enough for four men, and the table was still littered with it, but Lord Steinvar was not particular about the housekeeping when Lady Morgian wasn’t there.
“My father is a petty king.” The younger man dismissed his father’s house. “When I am done, my father’s house will be a cattle shed to mine.”
“The Romans won’t like that,” Steinvar said.
Decebalus grinned at him across the table. “Isn’t that why I am here?” They spoke a rough mixture of the Germanic tongue of the Semnones and Decebalus’s Dacian, and they understood each other well enough.
Steinvar laughed. “I thought it was because the trade had stopped between across-the-Rhenus and your caravans.”
“It was a good trade,” Decebalus said. “Later it will be better. Where is Ranvig?” He didn’t call the lord of the Semnones “the chieftain.” Decebalus was going to be a great king, and he saw no need.
“Keeping the emperor of the Romans at bay,” Steinvar said. “I speak for him.”
“That was not an insult,” Decebalus said. “I know you do. But if he can hold the Romans thus, why does he need me?”
“Because large talk will not be holding them forever,” Steinvar said, serious now. “Not for us, and not for you.”
Decebalus nodded and drank his beer. “Then we must give the Romans something more than talk, to worry them. Now tell me – what is this plan that Ranvig is so sure will work?”
It never ceased to catch him by surprise, Flavius thought, how deeply the woman had grown into his soul. Fiorgyn sat with her back half to him, combing her hair. Her gown was still down around her waist where he had left it, and he could see the tip of one breast, achingly familiar now, behind the curtain of her hair. She was sitting on a rock under the low overhang of a tree. Lopodunum wasn’t big enough to hold an inconspicuous inn, not for the emperor’s aide and a woman of the Semnones, and they had come of necessity to the final indignity and found a place in the woods for themselves. Flavius didn’t think he cared about his dignity anymore anyway, not with Fiorgyn.
She looked over her shoulder and smiled at him. He came and knelt before her with his face against her breast. She sat still for a long time, just holding him to her, so still that a rabbit ran out from the undergrowth and sat up and watched them. She put the comb down and brushed her lips through his dark hair.
“You’ve hardly spoken today. Is there something troubling you?”
“Yes.” Flavius sounded tired, his voice on the edge of cracking.
“Is it something you can tell to me?”
“No.”
She nodded. So many things they couldn’t tell each other. She couldn’t tell him that Ranvig had had a message from Steinvar yesterday. She had stormed at Ranvig and made him tell her what was in it when he hadn’t wanted to, and he had admitted, grudgingly, that she was not some Roman officer’s doxy who would run to him with everything she heard like so many of the women in Lopodunum. Almost, she wished she were.
Flavius sighed, lifted his head, kissed her, and pinned her gown back on her shoulders. He couldn’t tell her that there was a plan in motion to kill the emperor. Never. Not even if they weren’t at war. And he had no illusions about the war. It was going on now, even if Ranvig and Fiorgyn weren’t fighting in it. Before and behind them, wherever the main army wasn’t, the attacks went on. Slowly the Agri Decumates was being strangled as Julius Frontinus’s net of forts and roads was laid down on it, but the Germans were a presence felt in cornered patrols and burned-out watchtowers. Lately they had taken to setting fields alight so that the Romans couldn’t forage and so the local folk would be left for the emperor to feed along with his soldiers. It was costing the Romans dear, but still it was only a matter of time until the Agri Decumates fell. And then Flavius would lose Fiorgyn. The realization left him tongue-tied and panicked today. That and the fact that unless they could stop it, the emperor would lose his life, and along with him, Lucius Paulinus and Julia and whatever other poor fools had got in the way. Together he and Correus had thought of a scheme that might curb Vettius. Correus had sent a letter to Rome for the help they needed, but it was chancy. Everything was chancy that summer, thin and insubstantial like a marsh light, dangerous as a knife in the dark.
He put his hands in Fiorgyn’s hair before she could rebraid it, and kissed her one last time, burying his face against hers.
“Sir, they were out without their armor on. They’re lucky the Germans didn’t get them. I think three days’ punishment drill is entirely merited.” Correus stood at attention before his legate, feeling helpless and steadily more furious. The emperor was still at Lopodunum, but his army was in the field, sweating under Julius Frontinus, laying road northward from the Nicer River to the eastern end of the first great loop of the Moenus. And the legate of the Fourteenth Gemina was busy spoiling his troops, banking away their goodwill like the gold he was stockpiling, against the day he could make his bid for the purple. When Correus gave a punishment, Vettius countermanded it. The legion was a mess, and it would serve them right if the Germans ate them whole.
Vettius gave him a smile and a shrug of the shoulders. “It’s hot work, Centurion, laying road. We must make some allowances, don’t you think?”
“I think they won’t hold in the field, sir, when it comes to a fight, if they aren’t straightened up now.” Correus stood stiffly and tried to keep his temper out of his voice. “The legionary thinks only in here-and-now. They’re just happy to be let off punishment, but they’ll get used to it and not think what shedding their armor could cost them if the Germans show up. And if they lose their discipline there, it isn’t going to stick anyplace else. And neither will my orders, sir, if you countermand them.”
Vettius gave him a wave of his hand. “Go on with your road, Centurion, and allow me to decide that. If you don’t give such ill-advised orders, I won’t find it necessary to reverse them.”
Correus banged his fist into his breastplate in salute and stalked out. Vettius had been just charmed to have that order to countermand. It made Correus the villain, and Marius Vettius the friend of the common soldier, and Correus would still be around to blame things on if the legion disgraced itself. And it was going to if he couldn’t knock some sense into them when Vettius wasn’t looking.
Correus stood irritably in the dirt road outside the principia tent and squinted northward. It would be another month maybe before they reached the Moenus, and there they would stop to build a bridge. If nothing happened before then, he might be able to solve Paulinus’s problem and his own – if his father got his message, if Julius got there in time, and if nobody killed Domitian in the meanwhile.
The road moved on. The Roman army were the builders of the empire, and they carried pick and shovel as well as sword and shield. Where they had been, the road stretched out behind. Their marching camps became permanent outposts along the river valley, and signal towers sprang up between. They worked like mine slaves, and Julius Frontinus seemed to be everywhere among them, surveying, measuring, and watching his road grow. He was an engineer by nature, and almost as happy with a pick in his hand as an officer’s staff. Under Frontinus’s watchful eye even Marius Vettius found he had less time to relax; as long as the emperor was in Lopodunum, Frontinus was in command.
There were no real battles fought for the valley, only a series of skirmishes, ambushes, and night raids – exhausting, bloody, maddening, but more a trouble than a danger to eventual conquest. They were a threat, Correus thought, a promise that wherever the Romans pushed, they would have to push through burned fields and dead bodies in the water, making their progress slow and wearisome. The men were growing quarrelsome from it, and Frontinus personally knocked some heads together, summoned Marius Vettius to his tent, and informed him that his legion was the worst of the lot.
“Get out of that blond whore’s bed and out into a ditch with your legion, and they’ll come along some better,” he said briskly.
“It is my privilege to have a woman with me,” Vettius said. “Don’t threaten me, Frontinus, or I’ll make your little command a burden to you.”
Julius Frontinus looked irritated. He would have liked to have connected his sandal with the legate’s rear, but he expected his emperor wouldn’t like it. “No threat involved,” he said. “But they won’t go on loving you if they get cut up in a fight because you’ve been coddling them. Mull it over. You’re dismissed.”
Vettius pressed his knuckles to his gilt-and-silver breastplate, even more elaborate than the one Frontinus wore, and strolled out, keeping the pleasant, slightly bored expression on his face with difficulty. He wondered if Julianus had been sniveling to the chief of Engineers behind his back. Probably not. Old Appius’s bastard didn’t have enough sense to get ahead by climbing over his commanders. And the Fourteenth Legion was getting out of hand. But their greed for the next promised bonus was growing daily. They would put him on the emperor’s throne, and then their next commander could straighten them out. Or disband them; Vettius didn’t much care.
The woman was waiting for him in his tent when he got there, curled on the bed while one of the legate’s household slaves brushed her hair. Her name was Gwenhwyfar and she was Gaulish, or so she had told him. He thought she had probably had a lot of names. She hadn’t told him how she had come to be in a whorehouse in Moguntiacum, and he hadn’t asked. Likely she would have lied. She stood up now and stretched and wrapped her arms around him, paying no attention to the slave, and he saw again the hungry look that lay under the innocent face. It was what had attracted him to her in the first place – a woman with a hunger to match his own. He pushed the slave out of the tent.
She twisted herself around him. “When we reach the Moenus, then there will be a house to live in, and I will have clothes to wear.”
“You are not dressed in rags now.”
“I am not dressed as a great man’s woman should be.” She put her mouth against his ear and smiled when she felt his fingers tighten on her. “When we reach the Moenus, I will need more clothes.”
“There won’t be anything at the Moenus until we build it.”
“Then you can build me a house.”
“That will take money.”
She tilted her head back and smiled at him, eyes heavy-lidded. “Then you will have to have more money. Won’t you?” He kissed her and felt her mouth open under his. When they had made love – an odd, consuming passion that made him feel it had been almost a contest to see who should master the other – she opened her eyes and smiled again, drowsily. “Your commander – the tall one who builds the roads – he has been watching me. Maybe I will go with him.”
“He doesn’t like you,” Vettius said. “Don’t try it.” He grasped her wrist hard. “I won’t fight him for you, and he won’t give you anything.” But there was something in the languid eyes that made him a little cold in spite of himself. Almost more than money, she liked blood.
Ygerna sat down on the bed at the inn in Lopodunum and hastily pulled the seals off her letter. Berenice had written. Now if the older woman had only understood what it was that she was asking…
My dear child,
I am grateful for your letter. I am very lonely too these days, and court news passes me by, and I read your story with much interest. It had a very sad ending.
It would be such a shame for that to happen. Very dangerous, too, of course, to stop it and then leave loose ends lying about. We have had a fire here, and the whole kitchen wing is gone. The slaves were going to put out the fire when it was only half-burned, but I told them to let it go right down to the ground. It is always better to start fresh, my dear, don’t you think, than to try to clean everything up when a mess is left. One always finds things that aren’t properly understood, and that makes trouble. A good fire is a cleansing, I always say.
The rest was small talk and good wishes. Ygerna went back and read the beginning, her dark brows creased together. Then she saw it. Berenice couldn’t solve the problem. Correus’s scheme was going to have to do that, if it could. But Berenice had seen the danger in the aftermath. Ygerna folded the letter and pushed it down into the bottom of her sewing box.
Berenice, daughter of Herod Agrippa, once a queen, once an emperor’s mistress, sat placidly on a milestone by the road that ran past her country house and watched her kitchen burn. The big slave beside her gave her a puzzled look, but he knew better than to question his mistress when she wished to be uncommunicative. She had said to let it burn, so they were letting it burn. But she had set the fire herself, and he’d seen her do it.
Berenice raised her mantle to her mouth and coughed as the smoke drifted in their direction. There was a half smile on her face under the mantle. Her cook had been asking for a new kitchen. Now he could have one. And no one who might read her letter in its journey north would wonder why she would lie about a kitchen fire. It was always as well to cover one’s tracks. She had lived in too many palaces not to have learned that. So many palaces, she thought, and all such a long time ago. What was it that kept her in Italy now that Titus was dead? Pride, maybe. If she went back to her brother Agrippa now, it would make another scandal, and they would look so foolish, at their age.
But with Titus gone, and Ygerna gone, too, to be with her soldier husband in Germany, she was so lonely. Maybe it would be better to make her peace with the priests and be old in Palestine among her own kind. She could make her peace with God too, she thought. It was probably time for that.
Frontinus’s army reached the Moenus, with the road stretched out behind it, studded with eleven turf-and-timber forts, and another piece of the Agri Decumates was locked into the control of Rome. The Germans were still loose in it, in the pocket between the new boundary and the Rhenus, and the Chatti were across the Moenus, but it was safe enough along the road, so Correus sent for Ygerna. They would halt to raise a fortified bridge to join them with the army of Velius Rufus, which was driving its own road of forts southward from the Taunus Mountains and pushing the Chatti ahead of it. It was at that juncture, named Castra Mattiacorum for the hapless tribe of the Mattiaci in whose territory it lay, where Domitian planned to set up new headquarters. The innumerable folk who were making a living in the army’s wake began to pack their baggage again. The road that ran from Moguntiacum along the Moenus River to Castra Mattiacorum was jammed with carts and wagons.
Julius, having traveled from Rome with two mud-spattered ponies hitched to the front of a wagon, and two more, biting each other, tied on behind, took a look at the conglomeration of army supply carts, baa’ing herds of sheep, and a troupe of traveling actors on muleback, and said a quick prayer to Poseidon Horse-Father. There was a goat in the back of the wagon, bleating conversationally to itself, and Julius shot it a look of hatred. He gritted his teeth and edged the ponies out onto the road. An old woman trundling a crate of chickens on a handcart pushed past them, and the ponies snorted and started trying to kick in the front of the wagon.
Julius jumped off the seat onto the near pony’s back and grabbed an ear. “You’re a foul beast. Bide still. You can still be a pony-hide rug tonight.” He whispered his threats in loving tones, and the pony blew down its nose and stopped kicking. Julius looked over his shoulder at the other two. They were behaving no worse than usual. The goat was nibbling thoughtfully at Julius’s spare cloak, and one of the tethered ponies whickered softly and rubbed its nose against the goat’s curving horns. Julius sighed and kicked the lead pony. “All right, then, get moving, you bastard son of a milk cow.”
It had been, as he told Correus when he finally nursed the ponies and cart into Castra Mattiacorum, a proper bitch of a trip, and the next time Correus wanted a team of chariot ponies dragged across the Alps, Correus could let him do it the right way, on lead lines, with a spare groom, or he could do it himself. With the goat.
Correus grinned. Julius had filled out some and grown another half an inch, he thought. He was still thin, but he was tough and wiry, and his arms and shoulders were muscular. His character seemed to have undergone no change. “Where have you put them?”
“They’re tethered up in the civilian quarter, like you said, with all the other riffraff.” The vicus, the civil settlement that grew outside an army post, had mushroomed almost overnight at Castra Mattiacorum. The fort was built just beyond the drab huts of an unprepossessing native settlement, and the vicus had swallowed the native village whole. Most of the village had been abandoned when the Romans came anyway, and now the entrepreneurs who had flocked from Moguntiacum had adapted it to their uses.
“That’s fine,” Correus said. “Keep ’em there, and keep ’em looking like cart horses.”
“Well, they don’t,” Julius said. “Not to anyone who knows a horse from his hind end. Not that any carter would have them,” he added glumly. “They kicked in the wagon twice. They wouldn’t pull it at all until Diulius thought of putting the goat in with ’em.” He sounded as if he wished Diulius hadn’t. “The goat’s the mascot. Diulius uses it to keep the race ponies happy when he ships ’em. Have you ever slept with a goat?”
“No, but I’m afraid you’re going to have to go on doing it. We can’t leave them alone, and I don’t intend to sleep with them. Keep ’em out of sight as much as you can. Nobody’ll look close as long as they’re muddied up. The man we’re after doesn’t take his amusements in the vicus, anyway.”
“What are you up to? I saw all the notices for a race. They were pinned up in Moguntiacum, and they’re all over the vicus.”
“The ponies are a substitute entry,” Correus said, “but this isn’t going to work if anyone gets a look at them.”
Julius gave him a baleful look. “When I entered a substitute horse, Forst said he’d beat me.” He sounded aggrieved.
“You weren’t riding your own horse,” Correus pointed out. “And the stakes are a lot higher this time.”
“All right,” Julius said grudgingly. He turned in the tent doorway. “They had better be. I wouldn’t sleep with a goat for the fun of it.”
When Julius had gone, Correus set his helmet on his head, picked up his vine staff, and went to find Rhodope. The Mattiacorum vicus was a hodgepodge of dog kennels, stables, wine stalls, and temples to every god worshiped between the Tiber and the Nile. There were tents, native huts, and timber-built houses constructed of the leavings from the fort and the work that was progressing on the bridge a mile away. Correus had commandeered a reasonably serviceable native house on the outskirts for Ygerna and the children, and installed them in it with Eumenes for a watchdog. A few other officers’ wives had arrived, and those of the camp followers who hadn’t found other occupations could make a living either by building living quarters for officers’ families and Ranvig’s delegation, which had arrived in the emperor’s train, or by working on the bridge itself. There was a raw look to it, but Castra Mattiacorum was a town already.
Rhodope’s tent was pitched at the center of things, and she was ensconced in a padded armchair in front of it, surveying the prospective clientele. The tent was waterproof leather outside, hitched at one end to the red-and-green wagon it traveled in. Inside, striped silk hangings and beaded curtains gave it an air of Eastern splendor, and the pegged wooden floor, which could be taken apart and put together again without nails, was covered with cushions and thick rugs. Rhodope’s olive face broadened into a smile when she saw Correus, and she ushered him inside and sent one of the girls to get some wine. They wore old gowns with scarves tied over their hair, cleaning house for the evening’s company. Rhodope settled herself in a chair beside a folding table that bore an incense burner and a little bronze statue of a couple in an acrobatic position. Correus took a chair beside her and stretched out his legs. The air was heavy with incense, and the bronze girl appeared to wink at him over her partner’s left foot.
“I thought your bones were too old for wagons.”
Rhodope chuckled. The gold tooth gleamed at him. “I am also too old to stop eating. Moguntiacum is as dead as Colonia now that the emperor has come here.”
“How is business?”
“Ah, very good. Come tonight, and you will see.”
“My wife is here.”
“You are too respectable, Correus. It will make you dull.”
He laughed. “I want a favor, Rhodope.”
She became businesslike. “Of what sort?”
“I will give you a piece of useful information. Profitable. I just want you and your girls to see that it gets passed on.”
Rhodope looked interested, but wary. “And this useful information that I suspect could get me in trouble?”
“Only a tip on a horse race,” he said lightly. “Not dangerous.”
“Your legate is holding the bets for this horse race,” Rhodope said. “And he is dangerous.”
“Not to you. If you want to make some money, you can put your bets on the team entered by Centurion Quintus.”
“That is a long shot.” Rhodope, as he thought, appeared to have the odds in her head. Very few things having to do with money passed her by.
“Not so long a shot as Tribune Petreius’s team.”
“That is the favorite. The odds are even on.”
Correus shrugged. “Vettius wouldn’t like having to pay that.”
“Stop being subtle with me, Correus,” Rhodope said. “Has your thief of a legate fixed this race?”
“Yes.” He was certain of it now. Eumenes had been making cronies among the other officers’ slaves, and Tribune Petreius’s driver proved talkative when he had a head full of wine.
“And he means for this Quintus’s team to win?”
“Not exactly. His own team is the best horseflesh entered, barring Petreius’s.”
“But you tell me Quintus. I have seen Quintus’s team. They do not look so fine to me.”
“Then don’t bet,” Correus said. “All I ask is to put the word out and say to keep it quiet.”
Rhodope chuckled. “That should spread it faster than a fire.” She gave him a long, thoughtful look while he pretended to study the bronze couple on the table. “Your father raises horses, doesn’t he? I think I will bet.”
The bridge was halfway across the river. Julius Frontinus, his tunic tucked up into his sash of office and his legs wet from the knees down, stood on the bank, going over calculations with a junior engineer. A log barge was moored beyond the end of the bridge, and the crack of the pile driver’s lead weight sounded sharply across the water. Felix, who appeared each morning as soon as work began, tugged at Frontinus’s elbow.
“Can I ride on that?”
Frontinus looked down, amused. “Certainly not.”
“Why not?”
“Because you would fall off and drown.” He checked the calculations again and ran a hand through his graying hair. His helmet was on the bank, with his sandals and greaves. “That should do very well.” The engineer went away, shouting something at another man with a surveyor’s tripod, who stood on the completed planking partway out. Frontinus looked down at Felix. “You can ride in a boat with me if you like. Would that do?”
“Yes, please.” Felix smiled sunnily. “I have brought my lunch so I can stay all day.” He would have spent the night on the bridge, too, if anyone would let him.
Eumenes, sitting astride a log they were bracing between the upstream and downstream pilings, saw Felix’s small form trotting after the chief of Engineers and gave a sigh of relief. He should be safe enough with Julius Frontinus. Eumenes had been sent out to work on the bridge – Frontinus was commandeering any help he could get – not to nursemaid his master’s son, but if the little devil fell in the water, his mother was not going to think that was an excuse. He gave a final yank to the cording that secured his end of the log and started to splice in the cord end. Beyond him on the pile driver’s barge the ratchets clicked as the weight rose to the top of its trough. Eumenes winced as it slammed down again.
“Gets into your ears, don’t it?” a soldier said. He was standing in a boat moored to the pilings. He grinned up at Eumenes astride the log. “I’ll buy you a drink to chase the headache with if you’ll do me a favor. I want a bet put on for the legate’s race, and I’m confined to quarters.” He made a rueful face. “Drew three days for bein’ out after hours last night, but it was worth it. Old Rhodope’s got a girl who knows more positions than a snake.”
Eumenes laughed. “What’s your bet?”
The soldier looked over his shoulder and back to Eumenes. “Centurion Quintus’s team. Word’s out that they’re hotter than they look. I want to get in before the odds change. Put some on for yourself if you want to, but don’t spread it around.”
“I’ll keep it quiet,” Eumenes said. He chuckled and swung himself off the log. Those whores were better than a town crier.
“What have you been doing? You’ll out-clever yourself.”
Tribune Petreius looked at Vettius uncomprehendingly. “I haven’t been doing anything.”
“No? Well, if you weren’t the one who was stupid enough to try to sweeten the odds, who was?” Vettius looked as if he thought Tribune Petreius was plenty stupid enough, and Petreius bristled.
“I told you, I haven’t done anything, and I don’t care for your tone.”
“Well, someone,” Vettius explained patiently, “has been touting Centurion Quintus’s team as a hot bet, and there’s been a lot of money laid on.”
“But, that’s all to the good, isn’t it?” Petreius said. “I mean, Quintus’s nags are a long shot. They couldn’t take your team.”
“Then why is every soldier in this fort scrambling to bet on them?” Vettius inquired icily. “They have stopped betting on your team, I might add, which was supposed to be the point of our arrangement.”
“What’s the difference?” Petreius took a peach from the bowl of fruit on the legate’s desk and tossed it from hand to hand. It was pleasantly cool in the legate’s tent, and Petreius was disinclined to worry. “They aren’t going to win.”
“The difference is, they aren’t guaranteed to lose,” Vettius snapped, “and when that sort of rumor gets going and I didn’t start it, I get suspicious.”
“You’re always suspicious.”
“It has paid so far.”
“Well, Quintus’s team doesn’t look like much to me, but if you’re that worried, then have someone take care of them. He’s just a junior, and a through-the-ranks man at that. What can he do?”
“Admirable,” Vettius said sarcastically. “And then I will have to give back all the money that’s been bet on them if they’re scratched. And since no one seems inclined to bet on your team now, we seem to have lost the purpose of this race.”
“Oh.” Petreius looked thoughtful. “I know someone who might be interested in holding a second book. We could always bet on your nags with him.”
“You show signs of intelligence,” Vettius said. “That is useful. I’ll shorten the odds on Quintus, and maybe the fools will decide he’s not such a prospect, after all. But put the money down with your man, because if they don’t take the bait, I’m going to scratch Quintus.”
Tribune Petreius departed, eating his peach, and Marius Vettius looked after him nervously. Petreius was not the only backer involved in this race. A number of useful men had been included in the money-making here, and if anything went wrong, they were not going to be understanding.
“I took a look at Vettius’s team. Them and their driver,” Julius said, shuddering. “No offense, sir, but it’s a good thing you sent for the bays.”
“We thought so, too,” Flavius said, “when we looked at them.” Flavius kept his own chariot team, for his amusement, but one look at Marius Vettius’s golden-hided beasts had told him that his own hadn’t a prayer. Petreius’s team was even better, but they weren’t competition.
“That little horror who’s driving them is even worse,” Julius said. Vettius’s chariot boy was a subhuman menace with the temperament of a crocodile and was popularly believed to have had an ape for a mother. “I want to keep well ahead of him.”
“Now just a minute,” Correus said. “You aren’t going to drive.”
Julius sat up straight, indignant. “I didn’t nursemaid those nags clear from Rome to watch you drive ’em! And you weigh too much!”
“I weigh enough to sit on you,” Correus said. “Now look, Diulius says you have promise. He didn’t say you’re invincible. And you’re not a better driver than I am – not yet.”
Julius was outraged. “I drove in the Circus Maximus last year! In a real race. And I won.” He glared. “What have you been doing?”
“Getting old,” Flavius said. “But not so old that we can’t deal with you.”
They stood side by side and looked down at him. “I’m still a better driver than you are,” Correus said. “Keep arguing and we’ll shut you up in the stables.”
Julius looked disgusted, but he gave up. Flavius turned to his brother. “Now that we’ve settled that point,” he said lazily, “are you going to try to tell me you’re a better driver than I am?”
“Not you, too!” Correus said. “I cooked up this scheme. You aren’t going to risk your hide on it!”
“You had help,” Flavius said. “And Aemelius is my kin.”
“And I suppose you’ll say that Julia’s only half sister to me, so she and Lucius don’t count!”
“Don’t be an ass,” Flavius said. “The man’s your legate. He can boot you from here to a hole in Syria, and you never did like desert.”
“Not if we win,” Correus said.
They stood stubbornly confronting each other, and Julius watched them with interest.
“There’s more at stake than this race,” Correus said. “And the man we don’t want suspicious is the emperor. You’re on his staff.”
“He already knows I have a quarrel with Vettius,” Flavius said.
“He also told you to let it alone. If you want to be around when we’ve finished with Vettius, you’d better not show your face in this quite so publicly. Domitian doesn’t like being crossed.”
“Right,” Flavius said sarcastically. “He’s going to swallow a tale that Quintus really owns those bays, once he’s seen them race. Quintus couldn’t afford those ponies if he put his whole year’s pay into them.”
“He’ll believe they’re my ponies,” Correus said, “and I stepped in for friendship’s sake. Quintus and I go back a ways.”
Flavius snorted. “Quintus was a menace. He went Unlawful Absent and punched a sentry. And you got him a promotion. He owes you.”
“He straightened up when he got it, too,” Correus said. “He just used to get bored when there was nothing to do. Anyway, none of this makes any difference. Domitian doesn’t know that, and he hasn’t ordered me to keep my hands off Vettius. And there’s something else you haven’t thought of.” He looked hesitant.
“What’s that?”
“Your hands.”
Flavius held them up. Long hands, four-fingered. He didn’t seem to be offended, but his stubborn expression didn’t change. “They haven’t slowed me down yet.”
“You haven’t driven in a race that mattered this much yet. Can you say for sure that it might not matter?”
Flavius sat down and spread his hands out on the white skirt of his harness tunic. “Damn you, Correus. No, I can’t say for sure.” He looked up at his brother, and there was a lazy, dangerous light in his eyes. “All right, you can drive the bays.”
“And you’ll stay out of it.” Correus looked suspicious. He didn’t trust his brother an inch farther than he could have tossed the horses.
Flavius stood up again and smiled. “I told you, you can drive the bays.”
When race day dawned a week later, Correus was still suspicious, but so far his brother hadn’t tried to have him doped or tied up, which Correus wouldn’t have put past him. Correus passed up the dubious cooking of the officers’ mess, to which duty generally drove him, and had breakfast with his family. He was halfway through the light meal that was all he was going to allow himself, when Julius found him. After he had listened to Julius, he had worse things to worry about than what Flavius might do.